We started looking at ways to make instant hand-drawn or inkjet-printed circuit boards because Timothy met an engaging young man named Yuki Nishida at
SXSW. Yuki is a co-founder of
AgIC, a company that makes conductive ink pens and supplies special paper you can use to write or draw circuits or, if you have the right model of Brother printer, to
print them with special inkjet inks. The AgIC people are aggressively putting the 'A' in
STEAM by marketing their products to artists and craftspeople. Indeed the second line on their website's home page says, 'AgIC offers handy tools to light up your own art works.' This is an excellent niche, and now that AgIC has developed a
circuit eraser (due to ship this April), it may lead to all kinds of creative designs. And as is typical with this kind of company these days, AgIC has been (at least partly)
crowdfunded.
A little cursory Google searching will soon lead you to other companies selling into the home/prototype circuit board market, including
Cartesian Co and their Argentum 3-D printer that does prototype and short-run PCBs and only costs $899 (on special at the time this was written) and
Electroninks, which markets the Circuit Scribe pen and associated materials with an emphasis on
education. There are others in this growing field, and a year from now there will probably be more of them, all working to replace the venerable
breadboard the same way
electronic calculators replaced
slide rules.
